Danish participation in ”IEA ECES Annex 85 “Indirect Evaporative Cooling”

Cooling systems play a crucial role in buildings as they maintain comfortable indoor conditions for occu-pants. Currently, the majority of cooling systems rely on electricity-driven vapor-compression chillers. Alt-hough chillers can operate reliably to maintain thermal comfort, they are major energy consumers in build-ings, generating a large quantity of CO2. In addition, the refrigerant fluids used in vapor-compression systems present some environmental issues: flammability, explosivity, toxicity, or large greenhouse effect. In that context, the increasing awareness for environmental issues has led to great interest in pursuing new alternative cooling technologies such as indirect evaporative cooling.

Indirect evaporative cooling (IEC) systems work on the concept of decoupling of moisture (latent) removal from sensible cooling. In IEC processes, only clean water is employed for heat removal that utilizes the evaporative potential of the air. The main goal of the Annex 85 is to provide the application feasibility of the IEC technologies, and the technology roadmap for using IEC systems in different types of buildings located in different regions of the world.

The Danish partner (Aalborg University – Department of the Built Environment) will be involved in
Subtask A, C and D.